One of the first things that most people who log into the MoP beta quickly realize is that they no long have access to their lovely UI that they have slaved hours to perfect on live. There are a number of reasons for this, with the most prominent being that Blizzard needs to test things and know that when something isn’t working as intended it’s their problem and not some third-party addon glitch. In time, addons will be permitted, however there is a great deal of testing that you may want to do in the interim, and you want to be as functional a player as possible.

Ugh! You think. You’ve been healing with grid and clique, or Vuhdo, or some such similar raid frame setup for ages. How are you ever going to manage your way through anything without these tools?!?! Don’t worry! It’s really not all that bad and there are a few things that can make it significantly less painful!

First of all, pull out your raid frames and utilize them as your party frames. You can move them around, and you aren’t constantly squinting at the top left corner of your screen to see your party. This is probably the single, most helpful, thing that you can do for yourself.

The second most helpful thing that you can do, is create mouseover macros for yourself. I know, I hear you asking “wtf is a mouseover macro, and why do I even need it, Beru?!”. Well, let me tell you a little bit about what a mouseover macro does! It allows you to heal a target without having to click on that target to select them first. So basically, you just need to mouse over the target (as you would with Clique) and then activate the keybind that you’ve selected to bind your heals (sadly, blizzard doesn’t have a way to bind to your mouse in their default UI, so everything must be keybound). It saves you from having to first having to select the target you want to heal by clicking on them, and then subsequently clicking the spell you’d like to cast.

You will now be given the option to name your macro and select an icon. Do not worry about selecting an icon, you will not need it (more on this in a bit!), but go ahead and name it – I tend to just use the spell name.

Once you’ve done that, you will now have the option to fill out the macro text. Use the following text (there are two lines in the macro, just as shown below):
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover] (enter spell name)

i.e. If I wanted to create a macro for healing touch, it would look like this:
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover] Healing Touch

Note that capitilazation and spelling are important, as your macro will only work properly if everything is spelled correctly and your spell names appear just as they do in your spell book. As an option, when you are entering the spell name, you can open your spell book and shift click the spell and it will automatically enter it into your macro.

Now, drag the icon for the macro (it will start as a “?”) onto your action bars. You are finished! Heal your way to glory!

But…won’t I be looking at a bunch of “?”, Beru? I’m so glad you asked! No, you won’t! That first line of the macro (#showtooltip) will automatically change the icon to the default icon the first time you cast the spell, and it will look just as it does in your spellbook.

Once you become more comfortable with creating macros, you can do all kinds of crazy thing with them – but this particular macro will make healing on the beta much more intuitive and fluid. Good Luck on your early panda adventures, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions!

edit: As of the current version of the beta (v._____) you will need to add an ! before the following spells for your mouseovers to work:

Healing TouchRejuvIron BarkNature’s CureInnervate
Incarnation: Tree of Life (even though it’s not a mouse over, in hindsight, I’m not even sure why I’m macro-ing this…)

They would look like !Healing Touch in your spell name, for example. Note that this is likely a bug and will be fixed in future beta builds.

As an additional note – it seems that the current beta build has broken [target@self] macros for the time being as well.

No, no, I think maybe you are right and I made an error! I did this from the office on the fly, and didn’t double check my macros – because, well, work (ok, ok, and I thought I remembered them properly)! But I did poke around a bit on the interwebs, and they agree with you so I updated it, but now I’m going to have to check when I get home to see which I use or if I was confused (always a possibility)! :)

How do you bring out raid frames to use as your party frames? Do you need to be in a raid first to do this? Last time I used the default raid frames was in vanilla and you just drug it out from the panel that’s in the raid creation window which is inactive until you set your group to a raid. Is there another way now?

Ok, just checked it out. You will need to add “!” in front of the following spells in the current beta build for your mouse over to work:
Healing Touch
Rejuv
Iron Bark
Nature’s Cure
Innervate
Incarnation: Tree of Life

As an additional note – it seems that the current beta build has broken [target@self] macros for the time being as well.

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If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru